New Therapies for Parkinson’s Disease

Parkinson’s – Remedy/Cure

Parkinson’s disease which is a progressive nervous disorder affecting the movement had faced several failures is seeking a permanent remedy for the cure. The symptoms of Parkinson’s ailment tend to begin gradually with tremors.

This is common and the ailment has a tendency of causing stiffness or slows down the movement of the patient. Sometimes the tremors are hardly noticed. During the initial stage of this ailment, the person’s face may have no expression and the arms while walking may not swing. Besides this, the victim’s speech may become soft or slurry.

Though no cure for this ailment had been available, medication to some extent had some significant effect in the improvement of the symptoms. However, Katharina Volz, founder and CEO of medical start-up OccamzRazor, is said to make some headway in coming up with a solution for the most intractable issue, a treatment for Parkinson’s ailment.

In contrast to the several researchers who had made attempts in identifying a solution, in the past and had met failure, Volz has embarked on an innovative approach and is making a map. Volz had commented that `part of the problem is that Parkinson’s is really poorly understood and it’s a really complex disease so it’s difficult to get a full picture of what’s actually happening’.

Utilize Artificial Intelligence to Map

The signs and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease may differ among the victims. The initial signs could be minor and overlooked. Warning signs usually show up on one side of the victim’s body.

 It tends to worsen on that side affecting both sides of the body. Volz was of the opinion that by utilizing artificial intelligence to map everything with regards to the ailment, her start-up would be helpful in giving some insight and a solution to the cure of Parkinson’s disease.

Volz embarked on this research when on the completion of her PhD in stem cell biology at Stanford, in 2015, had received a phone call. This call came with some shocking news that her close relative had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

She had commented that she was totally distraught and had stayed at home for two days and had cried over the sad news. This led her to do a lot of thinking and eventually, she then made a resolution that she would discover a cure for Parkinson’s ailment.

At its initial stage, Volz had to identify a cure to know precisely what was already known with regards to the ailment. She needed to construct a system wherein the entire datasets with the scientific papers, patents, clinical trial data, together with the records of the patient, genomics data that sourced the information would assist her in bringing out perceptions regarding Parkinson’s.

Artificially Intelligent System

Volz had commented saying that they were aware of having a need of constructing a natural language processing system to get an understanding of the format that it’s in.

She had to turn to Stanford’s AI laboratory, which helped in supporting the start-up. The start-up helped in developing an artificially intelligent system that could take sentences from medical literature, labeling accurately the various genes, proteins, and metabolites.

It then identified the relationship between the substances labeled. OccamzRazor’s Natural Language Processing – NLP tends to reason out between the texts, utilizing the means of scientific literature in updating Human Parkinson.

OccamzRazor has been constructing the first complete map of a disease, in this instance, Parkinson’s ailment. It enables an understanding of how the ailment progresses, locates biomarkers, cultivates fresh healing objectives and assesses the efficiency of treatments.

With the help of this map, it would be easy to follow the complexities of the brain and get an insight of new hidden links thus enabling a quick recovery from Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s Disease-Machine Readable Graphs

With the use of this technology, a proprietary platform utilising AI has been developed to comprehend all data that is available. This is transformed into machine-readable graphs – The Human Parkinsome.

 It includes scientific literature, patents, medical trials, EMRs – electronic medical records, genomics, preclinical data and proteomics. OccamzRazor’s system thereafter linked all the data gathered into a 3D graph which according to Volz was Parkinson. This was a total map of Parkinson’s disease that we are aware of.

 Besides mapping the genetic components of the ailment, Parkinsome also provides details of the known proteins, the type of cells and metabolites which are active in the disease together with the drugs that tend to relate with them. The first test applied to Parkinsome was in identifying if there were any drugs utilized for other situations which could be utilised for Parkinson’s.

 Once the possibilities of treating Parkinson’s was recognized, Volz intends to partner with pharmaceutical companies in taking the applicant drugs through the expensive clinical experimental procedure and then to the market.

Volz commented that she did not want to wait another 10, 20 or 30 years in making this happen. She added that she wants to bring about effective medications to Parkinson’s patients as early as possible.

Incorporating AI with Data

This would not be a situation of incorporating artificial intelligence with the data. Usually scientific literature pertaining to an ailment could be contradictory or at times incorrect. Volz is of the opinion that her system can recognize contradictory results and eliminate them from the Parkinsome.

However, there could be some issues regarding Parkinson’s which we may not be aware of. No accumulation of research would add up the information which is not there. Volz admits that, certainly there are gaps in knowledge and at times it would be essential to run an experiment to cover up the gaps.

The company, Google AI, which reckons Jeff Dean, as an investor and advised by Nobel Prize-winning cell biologist Randy Schekman, would not be sharing the platform directly with a researcher.

However it would be functioning with Michael J Fox Foundation in locating fresh areas that would support in leading them to successful study. The Parkinsome, for Volz is only the start and the OccamzRazor database tends to comprise of information on a huge variety of conditions.

 OccamzRazor – Natural Language Processing - NLP

This according to Volz could be advantageous from an identical AI led technique. Volz is viewing one ailment at a time absorbing all the information available and linking it with each other. OccamzRazor’s Natural Language Processing – NLP tends to reason out between the text, utilizing the means of scientific literature in updating Human Parkinsome.

OccamzRazor has been constructing the first complete map of a disease, in this instance, Parkinson’s ailment. It enables an understanding on how the ailment progresses, locates biomarkers, cultivate fresh healing objectives and assesses the efficiency of treatments.

With the help of this map, it would be easy to follow the complexities of the brain and get an insight of new hidden links thus enabling a quick recovery from Parkinson’s disease.